Sakigake! Cromartie Koukou

Cromartie High School is absolutely worth buying, because it's hilarious. The characters are insane, and you can't help but like them, and laugh at them in every episode. One of the students is a gorilla who's also a sushi chef. There's also a robot, and a guy named Freddie who's about 45 years old.

The show makes no sense, but it makes me laugh, and that was enough to make me buy the DVDs.

The music fits the show and the animation is fine.

The voice acting is great. None of the humor of the original script was lost in the English dub. All of the ADV actors cast to voice characters in Cromartie High School, even minor characters, did a great job.

How's about a little delinquent genre parodying? This show is brilliant. I had heard a lot of good things about Cromartie High, but reading reviews on paper is one thing, and actually watching the show yourself is something else. It began with "Warning: to all viewers"--I figured "Ah, the usual watch-in-a-well-lit-­room-at-a-distance-f­rom-the-TV spiel", but no, it continued as "The characters in this anime are delinquents, so please don't follow their behavior" (it had me laughing whether it was intended as a joke or not). During the OP sequence it was hard to choose between watching the bizarre animation or reading the bizarre lyrics to the song ("Get out of the way, you bloody freak!"). Takashi gets his first taste of the characters around him when he drops a pencil. Even though I had read about what the delinquents at Cromartie like to do with pencils, it was hilarious! The episode moves on to the "I was a bad-ass delinquent bragging competition", and it becomes clear that there isn't a whole lot of logic (but plenty of humor)involved in earning prestige here. Takashi tries to blend in by reading a book about "Debuting as a Delinquent" (appearances are all important!). Come to think of it, I don't think a single punch was thrown in this initial episode, which is fine with me--bring on more of the same style of humor! I prefer the fansub version, in which profanity is commonplace ("Let's just get over there and f--- them up!"). I say this because A)these guys are delinquents, after all, and as such it's hard to take them seriously if they don't even swear, and B)because profanity is so uncommon in anime that reading it in subtitles frequently cracks me up! I recently rewatched the series as a whole, and I'd say it remains funny but is most hilarious the first time around.

(the school is named after Warren Cromartie, once a baseball player for the Montreal Expos, more recently for the Tokyo Giants).

My favorite line:

Mechazawa: "Hayashida, you're a good guy. You look like an asshole, but you're really sensitive towards other people"

Hayashida: "I'm blushing! If someone speaks like that, I can't be myself!"